They should not have chased him.

Marcus understood this thirty second after the order left his mouth, and thirty seconds was thirty seconds too late.

He had done everything correctly. The spread was right, long-range builds positioned on the back ridges, coverage across terrain that offered limited escape routes for a solo player. He had run this type of operation before. He knew what a contained target looked like.

Kai had looked finished.

He wasn’t.

"Spread out," Marcus said in a low tone. "Nine of you follow the other path and eight of you stay behind to make sure he doesn’t try to escape."

Eight members returned toward the ambush point while ten more took the right passage. That left thirteen with Marcus.

Five minutes passed as they moved down the slope.

No sign of Kai and no word from the other two groups either. He’d tried calling them twice now through the radio speaker.

But the right passage hadn’t answered.

Neither had the eight he’d left at the ambush point.

He kept that to himself and kept leading forward, watching the concern build on the others’ faces, careful not to let fear spread.

He didn’t want any fatal mistakes made.

"Where is he?" Yuna called as she entered a left passage.

Marcus didn’t answer because, in truth, he had no idea. Even with them following the tracks on the ground, they kept leading to dead ends that forced them to backtrack and try another pathway.

Routes did not behave like this.

Yuna came out of the left passage with a sigh and shook her head. "He’s not here either," she said. "He might have gone deeper."

Marcus’s eyes narrowed. "Then let’s keep going, but watch any empty areas... And also above you."

They kept moving, but it was too quiet. The dungeon had been loud during the initial engagement, creatures and barrage fire and collapsing terrain creating a density of noise that made individual sounds impossible to isolate. A dread was spreading through the area that made him slightly shiver.

Movement flickered across the cavern ceiling.

A shadow that crossed overhead and vanished before anyone could track its source. Marcus looked at the ceiling for two full seconds and found nothing. When he looked back down, Ren was still staring up at it.

And as Ren opened his mouth to speak, the area around them shook. Then a stone slab dropped from the ceiling and hit Ren.

There was no creak, no warning crack. It did not fall so much as arrive, like something had placed it there. The sound it made was enormous and went on longer than it should have. When the silence came back, Ren was on the ground with the slab across him. Above the spot where it had come from, the ceiling was smooth and unbroken, as if nothing had ever been there at all.

Marcus looked at the ceiling again. "Ren!"

He quickly rushed over to Ren but then paused as more came rushing down, forcing him to swing his axe and smash them to pieces.

"Watch above you!" he shouted.

Dust filled the air.

"What—"

It came from the left this time, not a falling rock but a dragged one. It ground across the terrain loud enough to sound like two things colliding, and it caught two of them before they had time to turn around. Marcus was the third to notice, because the first two were erased by it. The left side of their formation broke open where they had been standing.

Ten.

Two gone in a breath, ten left, the squad clustering subconsciously tighter around the loss. Marcus counted automatically, an old habit from his time in the army. He never moved his eyes; he knew they’d see the counting, and panic would propagate at the speed of a glance.

But he was losing. He felt it in the way he started to lose time, blinks getting longer as he tried to hold onto the illusion of control. But every decision suddenly felt delayed, like the dungeon was moving faster than his thoughts.

"He’s moving the terrain—" called out a voice from the back, Aidan or Aleph, the twins’ voices always blurring at this pitch.

"That’s not him, that’s the dungeon—" another voice, Lora maybe.

Neither of them finished, because something came through the opening the dragged rock had left.

It made no sound.

Marcus saw it only because he had been staring directly at the opening. If he’d had time to process what he saw, he would have realized it was true invisibility. Shiro was in his sight, looking around.

Then Marcus blinked, and Shiro was gone.

Nine.

Marcus did not move his hands. "Push him out," he instructed, and it was less a command than a prayer. "Abilities on every angle."

Six lights went up at once. Beams crossed and scattered off the mirrored rock faces, plasma and kinetic dust filling the space between them in overlapping arcs. It was a lot of firepower for one man. Nothing came back. No silhouette, no return attack, nothing to tell him where Shiro had gone or whether they had even come close.

"Lora, right flank," he started.

She was already turning.

But Mikkel, beside her, was a half-second behind it, and that was enough. Something yanked his weapon out wide and spun him sideways, and he went down into the path of one of the bull-headed guardians still moving along the lower ridgeline.

The shadow figure did not stop or look down, and never even slowed down. Marcus knew it was Kai, it was the same thing he did to Shiro.

Mikkel was there and afterwards he was not.

Eight.

Kai had moved the man three feet. That was all it had taken before a bull came rushing over and crashed into a person in the formation, dragging them away. Marcus watched in disbelief, unable to move while the others pressed closer to him.

’Is he using the monsters as well!?’ He thought with disbelief.

Another tremor moved through the dungeon, different from the earlier ones. Not structural collapse and not the creatures’ movement. Something deliberate, coming from deeper inside the dungeon where the boss room sat at the end of the main passage.

"Boss room," Yuna said from somewhere behind him.

The door had been closed. Marcus had confirmed it himself during the setup. Now it was not, the structure around it cracked along lines that suggested it had been forced rather than triggered by proximity, and from the darkness beyond the opening came the sound of something very large deciding to move.

[C-Rank Boss: Iron Mammoth.]

[Level 25.]

It was an enormous grey-plated creature with four curved tusks and stone-thick hide, its body built for momentum rather than precision, moving with the specific patience of something that has never needed to hurry.

Marcus understood what had happened before the creature fully cleared the doorway. Kai had done this deliberately. He had opened the room from a position he no longer occupied, and the creature that emerged had no target in front of it but a great deal of movement and noise behind it.

The Iron Mammoth turned toward the nearest source of both.

Which was them.

"Fall back—" 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

The terrain refused to cooperate. Paths that had been open during their initial spread had somehow narrowed. Rocks sat repositioned in ways too subtle to notice individually, but collectively created corridors that funneled movement toward tighter ground where their long-range advantage collapsed.

Marcus suddenly understood. All these dead ends, reroutes, and monsters appearing from the correct angles. Kai hadn’t escaped their encirclement to escape. Instead, he was reshaping the area to strike them down.

Dex tried to move wide right and found his route blocked by a stone that hadn’t been in that position two minutes earlier. He attempted to go left and encountered the same obstacle. While he was recalculating, the Iron Mammoth’s momentum carried it through the space he occupied.

The creature didn’t crush him intentionally. It simply moved through its chosen path, and Dex happened to be standing in it.

Seven.

"Scatter formation!" Marcus yelled, but there was nowhere to scatter to. The space was too confined, the walls too close.

The Iron Mammoth rounded the corner and saw them trapped against the wall.

It didn’t hesitate and simply charged.

The massive creature’s momentum in the confined space was devastating. Four curved tusks swept in deadly arcs as it crashed into their formation. Marcus tried to dive aside, but there wasn’t room.

The stone walls locked them in on all sides.

The first tusk caught Yuna across the torso, lifting her off her feet before slamming her against the rock wall. The second found Lora as she tried to roll away, but the massive head swept sideways, catching two more in its unstoppable arc.

The others stopped trying to escape and began fighting back, launching attack after attack against the boss.

They kept disappearing one by one.

And soon it was just Marcus. He looked around at what was left.

His team was gone.

The dungeon that he thought he had control of had been used against him. The whole operation was over in twenty minutes, and he still couldn’t point to the moment it had turned. Marcus had come in with twenty people, the terrain, the creatures, the timing, and the coverage.

The Iron Mammoth turned toward him with the patience of something that had nowhere else to be.

Then it stopped.

Marcus looked at what was standing in front of it.

It was his target.

Kai’s hand moved, and the blade arrived at the Iron Mammoth’s neck. The Fractured Blade’s edges wound tight with compressed heat, and he drove it forward and released everything at the contact point.

Flames burst inward.

The Iron Mammoth collapsed piece by piece like a building failing floor by floor.

The chamber fell silent.

Kai stepped over it and walked toward Marcus. He didn’t look back at the body. He didn’t look around the room. He just walked over like he had somewhere to be.

Marcus didn’t run because there was nowhere he could run. And Kai wouldn’t allow it anyway. Kai stopped in front of him and said nothing for a moment.

Then he put his foot through the back of Marcus’s knee, and Marcus’s head hit the stone, and the sound of it went through his skull before he heard it.

He looked up.

He saw Kai walking toward him, the rocks falling around him as if they didn’t want to touch him

Kai’s blue eyes caught the dim light of the dungeon, a faint glow at the edges. His face was the same as it had been outside the gate, the same as it had been during the ambush, the same as it had been through all of it.

Marcus had made a living reading people. He knew anger, and he knew fear, and he knew the face someone makes when they’re performing one or the other.

None of that was what he was looking at.

Kai just looked at him indifferently, like he didn’t even matter. But it didn’t stop his gaze from making him shiver as if he were being dissected.

"It’s time we talk," Kai said. "Properly this time."